Nov. 30 (Bloomberg) -- President Barack Obama is doubling
down on his push for Senate ratification of a nuclear arms
treaty this year in a bid to strengthen relations with Russia
and preserve his own standing as a world leader.

Obama will raise the treaty at a meeting today with
congressional leaders, and he may make a public statement to
increase pressure on wavering senators, a White House official
said. The administration also will intensify its warnings about
the global repercussions if the treaty fails, said the official,
who asked for anonymity to discuss internal strategy.

The president needs at least nine Senate Republicans to
ensure ratification of the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty this
year -- his top national security priority, he has said -- and
he is facing resistance from lawmakers led by Arizona Republican
Jon Kyl. Indiana Senator Richard Lugar is the only Republican
who has bucked his party’s leadership to urge support for the
treaty.

Obama’s failure to get the 67 Senate votes he needs “would
be seen as a weakening of his authority as the head of our
government responsible for foreign policy,” said William Cohen,
a former Republican senator who served as Defense secretary
under Democratic President Bill Clinton. “It will look to the
Russians” and many NATO allies as an “inability to conduct
foreign policy.”

Senate Republicans “could decide that they would rather
wound Obama and, in the process, wound the country” by not
ratifying the treaty this year, he said. “It’s their
decision.”

Asked to assess the treaty’s chances, Cohen said, “It is
going to be pretty uphill.”

More Challenges

A Senate loss would add to the global challenges that Obama
must confront in the next two years. He already is diminished at
home by his Democratic Party’s setbacks in the midterm
congressional elections and burdened abroad by the weight of
trillion-dollar budget deficits, a sluggish economy and a war in
Afghanistan stretching toward its second decade.

The White House also is seeking to minimize diplomatic
damage from the leaking of more than 250,000 embassy cables --
an action that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said
“undermines our efforts to work with other countries.”

Obama’s attempts to win ratification of the START agreement
may be undercut by tensions over North Korea’s shelling of a
South Korean island.

“There’s always the danger that the Senate’s attention
gets diverted by a crisis,” said Sharon Squassoni, the director
of the proliferation program at the Center for Strategic and
International Studies in Washington.

If the debate is pushed into next year, Obama would need to
get even more Republican votes, since the Democrats will have
six fewer senators in the 112th Congress.

‘Concrete Progress’

Ben Rhodes, a White House deputy national security adviser,
said Obama remains strong internationally. “There is not
another leader who approaches his respect and authority,” he
said.

“We’ve made concrete progress on key issues in recent
weeks like finalizing an agreement on Iraqi government formation
and cementing a deeper partnership with India,” Rhodes said.
“And we believe we’re making good progress in breaking the
Taliban’s momentum in Afghanistan.”

Still, progress on the START pact has stalled, and Obama,
who has made a new relationship with Russia a focus of his
foreign policy, calls it “a national security imperative.”

The treaty, which would replace one that expired last
December, would reduce deployed strategic warheads to 1,550 on
each side and require on-site inspections for both the U.S. and
Russia.

No Urgency

Kyl rejects the notion that there’s any urgency to approve
the treaty. He said the Senate has “higher-priority items” to
deal with, such as whether to extend the Bush-era tax cuts. And
he laid the blame for the delay on Senate Majority Leader Harry
Reid, a Nevada Democrat.

Reid “can bring the START treaty up anytime he wants to,
but he has a different agenda,” Kyl said Nov. 28 on NBC’s
“Meet the Press.” “He wants to do the Dream Act in order to
appeal to certain segments of the Hispanic community. The ‘don’t
ask, don’t tell’ policy to appeal to the gay and lesbian
community.”

Kyl and Senator Bob Corker of Tennessee circulated a memo
to their Republican colleagues last week, detailing concerns
over what they said was the administration’s inadequate plan to
modernize the nuclear arsenal and maintain nuclear-weapons
plants and laboratories.

Uncommitted to Vote

Corker and Johnny Isakson, a Georgia Republican, voted for
the ratification resolution that was approved by the Foreign
Relations Committee in September. So far, they haven’t publicly
committed to supporting the treaty if the full Senate votes on
it.

The Republican objections, coupled with a closing Senate
window, have raised the stakes for the White House.

“They have to go all in; they cannot afford to lose
this,” said Bill Galston, a former domestic policy adviser to
President Clinton who is now an analyst at the Brookings
Institution in Washington.

Lugar, the ranking Republican on the Senate Foreign
Relations Committee, is urging lawmakers to support the treaty.
He says START is needed to resume inspections of Russia’s
nuclear arsenal.

“This is not a casual affair,” he told MSNBC on Nov. 20.
“We do not have verification of the Russian nuclear posture
right now.”

Upgrading the Arsenal

In November, Obama offered an additional $4.1 billion to
his $81 billion plan to upgrade the U.S. nuclear arsenal. That
could benefit companies like San Francisco-based Bechtel Group
Inc. and lead to thousands of jobs at facilities in New Mexico
and Tennessee. Senator Susan Collins, a Maine Republican, called
that money “a step in the right direction.”

That offer may expire at the end of the year, giving
senators like Corker a choice: Support Obama’s nuclear arms-reduction treaty or risk losing money for home-state projects.

While the START agreement may present the most immediate
test of Obama’s ability to control foreign policy, it’s not the
only one.

In meetings timed to coincide with the Group of 20 summit
in Seoul earlier this month, Obama and South Korean President
Lee Myung-Bak failed to reach agreement on a free-trade accord
between the two nations.

And in the Middle East, Obama is struggling to resolve a
dispute between Israeli and Palestinian leaders over Israeli
settlement construction that has stalled peace negotiations.

Popular Overseas

“The question is to what extent Obama can persist in the
kind of pressure he’s put on Israel in the past, and the Israeli
government has figured out he can’t go very far,” said Dan
Schueftan, deputy director of Haifa University’s National
Security Studies Center.

Still, Obama has succeeded in changing foreign opinions of
America and is still viewed much more favorably than the
president he replaced, George W. Bush. While not as popular
abroad as when he was first elected, Obama maintains a reservoir
of goodwill internationally, except in many Muslim countries.

Majorities or pluralities of people in 16 of 22 nations
said they are confident that Obama will do the right thing in
world affairs, according to a June 2010 survey by the Pew
Research Center’s Global Attitudes Project.

By contrast, the public in only three of the countries
surveyed by Pew during Bush’s final year in office expressed
confidence in him. In each of the Muslim countries, Bush’s
popularity was lower than Obama’s current standing.